All Saints Year C - Friday, November 1, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
All Saints - Proper 25 - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Throughout history humans have had a strong appreciation for and connection with their ancestors. I think the notion of oneness is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” They were offering us the idea that the dead are at one with the living. This feast of All Saints entered the Christian tradition in the 4th century with a focus on relation and remembrance. What we are up to today is recognizing our sainthood and remembering those who have gone before us---all of us joined in this communion of saints. In such company we find comfort in our losses, courage for daily struggles, and hope as we face the future together.

The passage from Ephesians offers a commanding declaration about faith and salvation. The writer declares that the church is made up of those who chose to hope in Christ. The ending prayer for the Ephesians proposes a way which God, through Christ, brings all who believe into unity---a unity in time and across time. Those who have died and those who are living are one in Christ. Those who have died are already raised and those who are living are already marked for resurrection through baptism. The oneness of all things in Christ is our inheritance as saints. We are all in this together.

We live in and through one another. We become ourselves only through a process of mutual becoming. It begins in God’s own creative, self-giving love. Our core identity rests in that divine Love that birthed us all. This kind of mutual interdependence I have sensed to be true with the death of those closest to me. We are all one, just at different stages, all loved corporately by and in God. We are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being part of the whole, part of the Body that is Christ. This echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love granted to the Jewish people as a whole, and never just to one individual.

Consider how this awareness of reality upends so many of our current obsessions about private worthiness, reward and punishment, gender, race, class distinctions, and possessions. Weighing, measuring, counting, listing, labeling, and comparing go so far. The Gospel is about learning to live and die together in and with God. The good news is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in this Divine Love. We are the blessed beneficiaries, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Unless and until we can enjoy this, so much of what passes for Christianity will amount to little more than well-disguised narcissism and self-referential politics. Mature religion is meant to realign what our egos and survival instincts have put asunder, namely the fundamental wholeness at the heart of everything.

The source of our disease and violence is separation from parts of ourselves, from each other, and from God. Our shadow is any part of ourselves or our institutions that we try to hide or deny. Nonviolence, weakness, and simplicity are part of the American shadow. The larger and deeper shadow for Western individuals and culture is actually failure itself. Our success-driven culture scorns failure, powerlessness, and any form of poverty. We reject vulnerability and seek dominance instead, and we elect leaders who falsely promise us the same. In the United States today, white dominant culture prizes competition, urgency, individualism, and logic. Cooperation, self-care, and community are seen as inferior. Our Gospel today incorporates failure into a new definition of spiritual success. Luke shows that Jesus is fulfilling God’s compassion by living it with the oppressed and those on the margins and convicting those who are certain that they are righteous. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount by praising “the poor”! That should tell us how thoroughly we have missed the point of the Gospel. We avoid the very things that Jesus praises as we try to project a strong, secure, successful image to ourselves and the world. The beatitudes offer a foundation for holy living, clarifying, strengthening, and directing us in this life.

The early Church understood overcoming divisions as part of its mandate, emphasizing connectedness, oneness in Christ. Being Church means overcoming barriers. We cause so much harm and lose so much possibility by fearing our differences. Ultimate power is grounded not in rulers and authorities, but in God. Christ’s authority is evident in the church of which Christ is the head, and which shares in the fullness of salvation already, even as that fullness is being fulfilled.

To refuse the dark side is to store up the darkness. We are dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark. We know the plagues of bad things in our day as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance, gun violence, imprisoning refugees, and climate change.  Daniel knew those of his day and he reminds us of God’s promise to redeem, even in the face of injustice.  It’s easy to become disillusioned and to give up hope. But for the saints, God’s ultimate stand against all evil is sealed in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Any repair of our fractured world must start with those who have the insight and courage to own their shadow, so as to tap into greater compassion and creativity to live as our True Self—which is Love. We come to full consciousness by facing our own contradictions, mistakes, and failings. There is no shortage of opportunities to discover our personal or corporate shadow, especially in a monastic community. According to Jung, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” [1] God cannot be found out there until God is first found within ourselves. Then we can naturally see God in others and in all of creation. What we seek is what we are. The search for God and the search for our True Self are finally the same search. To fail in this is to deny one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.

Paul prays for his hearers that their hearts may be enlightened, so that they may know the hope to which Christ calls them. When we see only with our eyes or hear only with our ears, we may fail to claim the hope instilled in us. To see with the heart is to imagine the future which God is preparing. As Christians we are shaped by more than our experiences; we are shaped by our hopes, by the future into which we are living, and by the convictions by which we are living. Hope is best perceived with the eyes of the heart. Hope is best lived within a hopeful community, in the company of the saints, living and departed. Our feast today invites each of us to claim our place in their company.  +Amen.


[1] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage Books: 1989), 247.